Turning Your Blog into a Cash Machine

Let’s be honest, most of us would like a little extra money in our lives, and why not? Working hard to provide for ourselves and our families is nothing to be ashamed of and an honourable goal.

Unfortunately monetising blogs can be a difficult thing to get right:

Is the site’s topic suited to generating money?

Does filling a site with adverts damage its integrity?

Will the money making drive spoil the quality of the content?

I don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong with trying to make some extra income from our websites – I obviously do so myself! But I do think it needs to be done in a measured way.

Note: It can be tempting to squeeze every last promotional opportunity out of your site, but you may destroy the long term potential of your site in the process.

Does my Blog have the potential to Generate Income?

Some sites are much better suited for monitisation than others, but that said, there is normally an angle to be found somewhere. The simplest way to get started will be with a system like Adsense which will automatically pick out relevant adverts for you, you can then move on to trying to push specific products yourself, or even sell something of your own.

The amount you can make will be a factor of how much traffic your site is getting and what kind of products you are able to promote. And actually a well targeted site that answers a specific need has the potential to make money without requiring 1000s of daily hits.

In fact I have sites that I run that only get 5-10 people passing by each day, but the site is so highly targeted that one in five of those people will convert.

How Can I Maintain User Confidence?

If you do decide to monitise your blog, and I would suggest that you have a go, make sure you get the balance right. Most web users are familiar with advertising on websites, those that really hate it chose to block it out, the rest of us don’t mind well targeted adverts – they often highlight products and services that we are actually interested in which is a win-win situation all round.

However I strongly suggest you avoid the following:

Promoting poor quality products and services. Associating with such services will just make you look bad, it will make it look like you are just in it for the money (maybe you are?) and aren’t really interested in building a decent website. Well here at Blogercise we promote the idea of building positive websites and will always advice people to balance the monitisation with creating something you can be proud of.

Forcing adverts in at every opportunity. OK, it is true that placing adverts right in front of your visitors will result in higher click through rates, and again if your goal is to just get people to click on ad rather than build a long term user base then perhaps stuffing your site with ads might work for you.

Putting up insincere content to promote products you don’t even know about. Your readers aren’t stupid, they will size up your site in a matter of minutes. They’ll know if your “reviews” have been made up to get some incoming search engine traffic or whether you have genuinely used the product you are talking about.

A Second Income

Building an income from your website is nothing to be ashamed of and by working hard and building something to be proud of you’ll be able to enjoy that extra income knowing that you have earned it. This is why here at Blogercise we promote the idea of creating decent websites that meet a real need and deliver content to those that want it.

Note: Over monitising a popular website might result in a lower quality site, less visitors and therefore a lower income.

There are plenty of get rich quick schemes out there on the Internet and who knows, maybe some of them might even work for a lucky few! However if you are looking for a long term earner then you’ll need to invest some time and energy into building a decent website.